Welcome to ReefCentral.
Because of the sheer size of our forum, we've been forced to limit selling and trading to members who've met a couple of criteria. (If you're seeing this message, you haven't met them yet.) Please take a moment to acquaint yourself with our selling/trading rules to help make your stay a long and rewarding one.
Selling and trading on ReefCentral.

Well, the anemone looks great today. I would say he is completly recovered (cross my fingers!). According to Sprung and Delbeek about how to get rid of the old water with the antibiotic:

"Before discarting the old water put 1/2 cup of bleach per five galons of antibiotic laden water, mix and hold for several hours before you discart the solution down the sanitary sewer. The blech will destroy the remaining antibiotic and any resistant bacteria present".

What is interesting, when I googled "Elhifloxacino" it redirected it, and one of the first links was for "levaquin" which is a fairly strong anti-biotic which I end up having to take about once a year. Wonder if that would be effective -- might even have some in the medicine cabinet.

__________________
Click my name and then "visit toddrtrex's homepage" for tank pictures

I found some of the original posts on Enrofloxacin very interesting. I have tried a few times to acclimate a Gigantea to my aquarium without success. Each time the results were similar. The first few days were good, and then slowly over time the anemone would do more and more "water changes" on itself, and eventually turn inside out and die. So I ordered some generic enroflaxacin and waited for a good time where I wasn't traveling to start. The OP has been very helpful and has passed some information/journal articles on to me, as well as asking advice from some of his friends who were experimenting with this treatment on fish. This is what I did:

1). I dosed 5mg/l enroflaxacin in a 5 gallon SW bucket. The anemone was in the bucket and I had a nano koralia for flow, a mini heater, and an airstone.

2). Due to water quality issues I changed the 5 gallons twice daily. I do not feel even this was enough as with each water change the anemone perked up immediately. I read ammonia readings of 1.0 at times.

3). Lighting is important. I started off with ambient room lighting, but soon threw a HO flourescent overhead on the bucket, as in even a few days I witnessed bleaching in the anemone. This was still not enough.

4). I did this for 5 days. I can tell you at the end of the five days the anemone did not look like it was going to make it. So I pu it in my DT, where at the least it wouldn't die in a TM Pro bucket.

The anemone has been in my display for 1 1/2 days now and it is fully expanded and the mouth is closed. I am very surprised. Who knows what the future holds for this anemone. I am not sure what can be gleamed from my experiment, but there it is.

Injectibles(liquid). I think the treatment calls for daily dosage, like a human would take antibiotics, but since I was doing 2x daily water changes I just refreshed the dosage each time I did a water change. Honestly it was pretty tough on the anemone and at one point I thought the treatment was going to kill the patient. Im not sure how I would do it differently, scrubbing the water somehow I think is very important. Problem is with that much antibiotic, biological filtration is out. The medicine I have is 100mg/ml so it worked out roughly to 1 ml for a 5 gallon bucket.

5 gallon X 3.78541179648 litres = 18.9270589824 litres

18.9270589824 * 5mg = 94.635294912 mg

or roughly 1ml of 100mg/ml enrofloxacin

This dosage was based on recommendations and not any real proven regimine that I found. This is about half the dosage that is being used experimentally on fish right now. There is a user on RC that has used enrofloxacin to treat fin rot in angel fish. Here is the link, not a lot of detail.

If I understand you correctly, you think that the problem was due to ammonia/waste in a small container, rather than the meds themselves? Would a product like Amquel work to detoxify waste products (since you were changing water so frequently)? It's what I use when medicating / working with large koi in small bodies of water (shipping / taking to shows, etc). It's supposed to work the same in fresh and salt water.

I do not know Amquel but tried "stop amo" from prodibio and "prime" from Seachem and none of them reduce the amonia in 12 hours time.

I use Pond Amquel, and all I can say is that it almost instantly detoxifies tap water. Here in Southern California, our tap water is horrific - and the water utility doses heavily with chloramines. Pond Amquel not only breaks the chlorine/ammonia bond of the chloramine, but it detoxifies the ammonia. I sometimes need to medicate large 18" or longer koi in small containers (20 gallons or so) and Pond Amquel does a good job for me. I can't imagine that an anemone puts out more ammonia than a large fish, but it is worth trying. Amquel cannot be overdosed, so I add two or three times the normal amount and it "buffers" against ammonia production (or so I hope). This is the product they use at Koi Shows here in Southern California - where people are putting koi worth $1,000's in small show tanks without filtration for a day or more.

__________________
"You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!"
- The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkien

The distinction between these methods can be important, as some combinations of ammonia binding products and test methods can lead to false ammonia test results (either causing apparent ammonia presence when it is bound, or simply causing a color that is not predicted by the test kit). For example, a Nessler type kit cannot read ammonia properly if the aquarist is using Amquel, Seachem Prime or related products to bind ammonia. The result is often an off-scale brown color.

So, it is particularly important that aquarists understand how the test kit that they are using, and the binder that they are using interact, and the manufacturers of each are the best place to find such information.

I would get cloudy water and lots of waste from the anemone in a very short amount of time. I thought about using amquel, but was concerned, valid or not about introducing something else into the equation. Something to consider, The anemone I was medicating was not small, but rather a good 14" in a five gallon bucket. During the process it also seemed to be ridding itself of zooxanthellae, as it is lighter in color, and even in my display tank is expelling small amounts of brown waste even now. I have it under three layers of window screen, so hopefully this will stop.

But you are right, it could very well have been the product or the dosage. I experimented on one anemone and my results are hardly conclusive, merely anecdotal. I think even something like a filter sock would have been good to collect floating waste so it did not re-enter the mouth. The anemone I treated never looked real great while being medicated, where as the OPs anemone seemed to recover at the end of treatment.

I wish I had taken some pictures when it was really bad. At one point it was down to about 6" in size, crinkled, and the skin was almost hard it was so compact. It was turning inside out, and upside down in the bucket.

It's closing in on three days in the DT and no signs of deflation. The mouth has been open at times to expel waste, but then it closes again. The anemone seems capable of ridding itself of its own waste at this point. Time will tell.

I thought about using amquel, but was concerned, valid or not about introducing something else into the equation.

From the Kordon link I posted, here are some tidbits:

USE: To remove toxic ammonia compounds that build up in aquariums and ponds from the excretion of body wastes by fishes, invertebrates, bacteria, and other aquatic organisms start with a Standard Dose (see definition above). This Standard Dose not only removes the chlorine and chloramines described above, but will also remove (detoxify) at the same time 1.0 mg/L (= approx. 1.0 ppm) of all ammonia compounds in fresh or salt water. Use multiple doses to remove more than 1.0 mg/L ammonia from the water.

CONTRAINDICATIONS: Pond AmQuel should not be added to water containing active, therapeutic dosages of chemical dyes such as methylene blue, acriflavine, potassium permanganate or malachite green, since Pond AmQuel will interfere with their proper performance. Combining Pond AmQuel with these dyes will not result in toxic chemical by-products.

Pond AmQuel is compatible to use with all water quality test kits except for the ammonia test kit that uses Nessler reagents that read in shades of amber or yellow, and the oxygen kit that uses Winkler reagents. Residual Pond AmQuel and its reaction products are incompatible with the Nessler and Winkler-type test reagents, resulting in false, high ammonia and low oxygen concentration readings. All other types of test kits produce accurate test results, such as ammonia test kits using salicylate-type reagents. Pond AmQuel will temporarily (for approximately 12 hours) lower redox.

I will send an email to Kordon and specifically ask about use of their product with anti-bacterial agents.

__________________
"You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!"
- The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkien

I would get cloudy water and lots of waste from the anemone in a very short amount of time.

Based on what you are describing, I think the anemone looks fantastic. I have seen giganteas in the "death throes" you describe, and I can't recall ever seeing one recover after the "flip upside down and turn inside out" phase.

The cloudy material you describe could have been bacteria, dead body matter, or for that matter, sperm. No real way of knowing without evaluating a sample. Regardless, it is all just ammonia in the end.

Your photos speak louder than words. The anemone appears weak in the first photo, but much better in the second. Don't worry about the zooxanthellae - it is a common biproduct of moving these guys around. As long as they aren't rejecting ALL of their zooxanthellae (and bleaching completely) it is a sign that they are adapting to the new lighting.

__________________
"You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!"
- The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkien

I'm not sure about the OP, but as for myself I tested using an API kit. I also have a Salifert kit, but I was interested in a general sense of where the ammonia was 0 or not 0 so it really didn't matter to me. I got readings of .25 to 1.0 ppm from just 12 hours in fresh clean water. I thought the numbers high and I tested my mixing bucket and got 0. At some point I stopped testing an just did 12 hour water changes.

Some of the literature talks about 5 hour baths for fish. Dosages on fish are still being experimented with. I think you could potentially try a daily 5 hour bath, and then into a more sophisticated system for better filtration. If someone could get a hold of 100 Giganteas we could do a real study.

I used JBL test, NH4 disolved and read 1,0 aprox at 24º and at unknow PH.

Well, this is "my theory" about the anemone illness, of course it has not been proved scientifically:

The anemones have "always" ingested food in their stomachs, inside (were mesenteric filaments are) there are several strains of bacteria (as also in their tentacles, as you can read in academic articles using google) living together "in balance" (the same as in our stomachs ).

When the animal is shipped, the changes in the water chemistry(CO2 increase, amonia increase, ph decrease, disolved oxigen decrease, etc) produces an unbalance in the population of bacteria, and "bad bacteria" (for examplo vibrio sp.) take advantage. The infection is then started, inside the anemone and no visual symthoms are shown.After some days, normaly in our tank, the anemone "knows is infected", then everts its stomach in order to get rid of previous rotten ingested food, but without a strong water flow directed applied, the rotten wastes remains inside, then bacteria start consuming the living cells of the tissues and there is a rapid necrosis wich kills the animal very quick.

In an article I read, it explained that the bacteria vibrio sp. introduces itself into the anemone tissues, reproduces and atack the zooxanthellae, inhibiting the photoshynthesis. I though: " maybe, this is the reason that the gigantea inflates at night and deflated in contact with ligh when is infected".

This is extracted from google search:

"Zooxanthellae are known for their symbiotic relationships with coral. Zooxanthellae often suffer from bacterial infections that attack corals. For example, the bacteria that causes Yellow Band/Blotch Disease (YBD) in Montastraea species actually affects the Zooxanthellae endosymbionts rather than the actual organism. Many bacterium interfere with the photosynthetic processes of these organisms".

So, maybe,it is the same situation as with fishes. When they suffer stress, their inmunological system is affected and the bacteria or other parasites takes their oportunity to develop and progress, killing the host.

So, maybe,it is the same situation as with fishes. When they suffer stress, their inmunological system is affected and the bacteria or other parasites takes their oportunity to develop and progress, killing the host.

Maybe... It would help explain why so many anemones come in "stressed" and they decline even AFTER they are placed in a good environment. I have brought in giganteas that looked great in the store, and placed them in a tank with another healthy gigantea that is thriving, and watched as the new gigantea faded and died.

Which raises another thought, since we are sharing ideas...

I have often wondered about the occurrence where one "sick" anemone is introduced to a tank with healthy anemones, and the first anemone starts to inflate and deflate, and then suddenly all the previously healthy anemones start to inflate and deflate as well. Then one or more of the previously healthy anemones dies along with the newly introduced one. It could easily be due to the healthy anemones ingesting bacteria from the infected one, particularly if the sick anemone is spawning (due to stress) and it is triggering spawning behavior in the other anemones...

I tell you what. This discussion about antibiotics has me more hopeful about figuring out care for these creatures than I have been in a while...

__________________
"You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!"
- The Hobbit; J. R. R. Tolkien

Sadly I think my journey is ending tonight. What started as possible sexual reproduction (smoke like appearance from the anemones mouth), ended in full deflation and my clownfish ripping necrotic organs from the anemones everted stomach. It is still alive, but not looking good. I may attempt to put it back into an antibiotic bath, but I probably created super strains of bacteria in this anemone that will not respond. My regimen with enrofloxacin needs to be highly scrutinized/modified.

Hi Jeffreylesser, I feel sorry to hear that. Mine was looking worse and recovered. Probably you feel tired but why not give another oportunity in the QT with antibiotic and koralia placced in front of him, without light?.